Editorinchief of essence magazine for africanamerican women. The editor that are overseas the content addition of the magazine as well as essence. Com. Her influence extends beyond the various rain extensions, including event such as essence fest, black women hollywood luncheon of black women in music. Before we start the conversation, well have shown they come out and read a passage from masons memoir. Charlene is a Community Organizer and writer. She currently serves as National Director of the black Youth Project 100, also goes by the way p100. An activist member of that organization of black 18 to 35 with dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all black people. Over 10 years of experience and racial justice, feminists and Youth LeadershipDevelopment Movement work. Please welcome show lane. [applause] thank you. First i would like to thank c. Nicole mason for the moment to share with her. As you all should know, many of her achievements. Tonight i had the opportunity to read a number of passages. If you have not read it, you need to read a, byatt and i went or your friends, is to. The passages i chose a deeply resonate with me. As they share with nicole, i said wow that happened to me a moment while reading this book. So ill get started. I did the right thing. Im the beneficiary of many of the programs we are talking about here today. I attended had start. I was involved in afterschool programs. Im the first person in my family to graduate from high school, to attend college and to receive a phd. By now, i was shaking but i could not stop. I was having a public the private conversation i reserve for my firstgeneration black and latino colleagues who i dont do successfully navigated their way out of poverty and into the middle class and to have a deep understanding of the journey from there to here. These people in this room are strangers. I am only one person i continued. Growing up i knew many kids in my neighborhood who are smarter and more capable than me and they didnt make it out. Many have been killed, gone to prison, and living hand to mouth or otherwise on the margins of society. Should i blame them for this test and then allows only a few of life at a time to hate . The room was pregnant with silent. I couldnt take it back. I felt like an intruder and exposed in these types of oppression offsetting a personal ax. Since with hunger, poverty and at this article must often go undetected. It is assumed that i am just like everyone else, an advocate, a policy expert or an academic. Typically when a women is in my day to tell their story during these panels are meeting, if thats where a second time in like a performance. Her story has a perfect predictable arc. She was lost then found by one of the many social Service Agencies in the city. She changed her behavior, became a better mother and although she shall struggle to make ends meet, is on her way to Economic Press rarity. Hallelujah the end. Her story is meant to inspire, to whip up emotions and to make the people in the audience feel good about their work in themselves. It is not meant to challenge or change how we make policies were shipped out poor people in our communities or cities or Larger Society offers neat. There is also a clear separation between her and the experts on this page. Day, not she are deciding what should be done. Here i was blurring that line. I was both the subject and the authority on the matter. I have firsthand knowledge of the messiness of poverty and the feelings the poor internalize from both. Our very existence is a burden on society. The collapse of the boundary made me uncomfortable. I worked hard to disguise my beginning of my friend the decision to change my name during my first week of college to the effort of the racing words and phrases i cant been since the go. From my vocabulary. I had succeeded in creating the perfect impenetrable mental path mask. Mouth was soft. Now it was off. The next piece is from the chapter entitled free today. The mark of a Good Childhood is freedom. Freedom from worry, stress and birds coupled with the freedom to explore, but when word without consequence or incident. These freedoms are often denied to children living in poverty has nine seconds in daily without the survival and questions about their next meal, safety or housing. Concerned that they may never speak aloud. My grandfathers house was a welcome respite in the chaos and unpredictability in the heels of the duplex. There were no fights, rats are out of control women banging on our door at odd hours of the night. For the first time, my brother and i had the space to be children. We played jacks, marbles and barbies and listen to new addition. Michael jackson and Stevie Wonder on my grandfathers record player in our living room. Join the girl scouts as a brownie. Once a week a hippie looking woman with long blonde hair picked me up in a rusty flatbed truck and took me to the brownie meetings in an old church across town. Im not sure if it was my mothers idea for mine that i become a member, but it never quite understood what was going on or what we were supposed to be doing there. Collecting badges, making pledges, selling cookies. I just did not get it. I was one of two black rose and the large troops in felt out of place. To make matters worse him a while to play jump rope during one of the meetings, the other micropunched me, punch me out for not allowing her to have to turn in a row. It was my first bite and i have lost. I did not understand how she could be so angry with me when we were the only two there who vote like us. In my young mind i had dirty made peace with the way girls that wanted to play with me. I was different from them. My hair was spongy, not bond or stringy. I do not live in their neighborhood or listen to the same music. They were strange to me too. However, i could not figure her, the black ones out. Why did she want to be my friend . Why is hopped out of the side of the chart that are meeting i decided i had enough and with never going back. A couple weeks prior i suffered through a Slumber Party where no one talked to me. Ask me to brush their hair or offered to brush mine. This was not the type of sisterhood. My mother did not question my decision or ask why i decided to quit. The following week when the hippies honked their horns outside of our home for me to come out, my mother waved her off and told her that i would not be back. The last piece that i will read this from the chat entitled wedding day. I was fired she said quietly. Her neck crane out of the car door she pulled into our driveway. She had been employed from a few weeks enough work for a young white lawyer in los angeles. Why i asked puzzled why her announcement. He tried to hit on me and i told him i wasnt into that so i quit. The word swirled like a small tornado in my head. It did not make sense to me. Did she really quit because she refused to have with her boss. Bosses really do that . I believe trade body was a. Later i found out the worst ive had had called my mother made. I made. When she saw her vacuuming the office. She did not approve of his higherend, such an attractive aid and demanded she be fired and he complied. Telling me initially that he had on her was her way of hiding the humiliation of powerless miss sheep out for being fire so abrupt way. Even in her shame, she was said to have created a world that was uncomplicated at the messiness of racism, passes them and in this instance, sexism. After about six months of searching for work, my mother returned to the college where she received a paralegal certificate and demanded clarification on its value. She had taken up thousands of dollars with a student filed a needed them to pony up on their job guarantee. As reinforcement, she took along with anothers event he took along with her anothers dude who had also had a hard time finding a job. After being brushed off as several Different College officials committed to threaten to file file a complaint against the college with the Better Business hero or whomever else they could think of in that moment. Fearing their country would be blown, the college regained their debt in exchange for this finding a nondisclosure agreement and just like that, my mother was unemployed, without a degree am back to square one. Thank you. [applause] now please welcome vanessa de luca and c. Nicole mason. [cheers and applause] good evening, everyone. Hello, hello. I am really happy to be here. Hey, charlie. I just wanted to say thank you to my aj, marie brown. I dont know where she is. The legendary marie brown for believing in me. There she is in the back and my research and my story from the very start and i just wanted to give a shout out to thank ms. Units who are here. I dont know where they are. Paris, john may come make your sin. They are here somewhere is still always this best and brightest women in the room. So i wanted to thank them before i got started. Thats wonderful. This is really truly stunning memoir and we are going to spend the next hour just kind of x or in a little bit more deeply and talking about basically what prompted you in from tel aviv to tell use tories. Well have a little time for q a and then you are going to treat us to your own breeding from the work. So lets jump right in. I have to tell you that this statistic that you put in the book literally stopped me in this book. That is 47 Million People in the United States live in poverty. Not surprisingly or maybe it should be but its not, highest among blacks, latinos and fema out of household. So when you introduce the book, use a the poor girl in me wants to explain why we dont all make it out. So i would love for you to talk about why did you want to write a book that exposes so much of kind of where you came from, how you begin because telling people that you grew up in poverty as you mentioned as the reading isnt easy. So why give you the courage to do it . Well, really want to tell a different story about poverty and a different story about my communities and the people who lived in them. I think there is a narrative to hear it all the time if you work hard enough to make it to the top. Barack obamas second speech he pretty much says that. Even when people say that, i feel really uncomfortable because i know thats not the true because only a small portion of people born into poverty ever make it to the middle class or to the top. So i really wanted to make an intervention and tell us tori that we are not only give life to what i know to be true, but also disrupt the damage a narrative that we see all the time circulating in the popular media and culture. Did you have any kind of fear or worries are concerned about kind of digging into your story and talking about your past . Guest so, there are two things that the first concern i had was with how the story would be interpreted. Even early on when i did a work in progress film, one of the other professors told me to this site instead you really need to be careful about this affect people, even though you may say about her but it through their own minds. Thats stuck with me when i was writing because i wanted to just be honest and tell the truth, they really cant defend about how the story would be interpreted as other people. You know, it has. You know, readers pick what they will send the story in some instances have had to push back on interviews when they interpret the story. You know, your poor growth from your mother was a teenage mother. They feel like theyve heard the story without even reading the book. So i think that is problematic. The second thing i worried about was my family and how they would read the book. I was very clear that i with my academic training could tell the story they couldnt. Even if they didnt agree with me, the possibility of them writing another book, the true book was pretty slim. So in the back of my head when i was writing the book, i had to think about what will my brothers say . What will my mother say . Is it something that will hurt them . Will they say its not true . So as i was writing, and i was cognizant of all those things. You also said he spent a lot of time interviewing people, kind of going back in talking to people from your past about what they remembered and how they remembered it and that kind of help you as you are shaping the memoir. Absolutely. So i interviewed my mom, my family members, my cousin, old veterans. I went to my Old Neighborhood when outsiders sold it and went and visited the apartment complex, the first one that i heard. It was really jarring. The stuff that i thought hadnt impacted me when i saw, for example, the first Apartment Building and clothing lines hanging from apartment to apartment. I said wow, this is my first home. I fell down the stairs on my tricycle. You know, those kinds of memories. Was it the way you remember it or you had a different vision in your head . You know, sometimes people dont believe me that i didnt know i was poor grow in a period that Apartment Building was amazing to me when i was growing up. Its where we lived. Thats where all my friends were. We had dance contest and it was very late. When i went back today i said wow, there is nothing here. There were no flowers. The paint was peeling. Like i said there was clotheslined. Now this is where poor people live. I think even having that land to be able to contextualize next year is growing up is one i dont think we get to hear when stories are told. Host did you encounter a lot of people still there but it had been years obviously here is that god i think the Old Neighborhood or at their neighborhood. Did you happen upon people . My neighborhood that i grew up in High School Like smoke to my friends still there so when i go home its like a homecoming. Im not cold. So we just sit down and play spades or do whatever record to do. When i went back to the first home, what happened and what i know to be true, i came there snapping pictures and people were looking at me like i was an alien, like they did not belong. I felt bad because that is what happens when you people you dont know coming to your neighborhood. I had to say ive lived here when i was five years old and it was too latina women so they started talking to each other and then i guess it was okay. You know, thats what happened. That kind of dynamic for a start snapping pictures of the people in the neighborhood dont feel empowered to say what are you doing here . I know now in other neighborhoods where they can somebody will say what are you doing here . If that makes sense. It does. But that your family. So you talk to your mom. Utah dear brothers. My father, my mother and father gave me the same story, different facts. Im going to have to take a middle ground here. Anything that is because everybody was using around that they were seeing their story like my brother when i interviewed him, i said why do you think it is that mom and i had a difficult relationship . I wanted to hear what he had to say. He said, you know, i think you thought you were smarter than her. And i was like thats not my interpretation of what i thought was a problem. You know, so some of this stuff is really hard to hear and internalize. When i was writing, i said okay heres how i see it that the information other people are giving me about the same story that i also need to include to have a more accurate telling of the story. He thought i was really outspoken so i imagine myself as really quite enormous big enough when necessary. You know how all of us imagine ourselves. To start when there wont be none, but if there is i will bring it. That is kind of i saw myself. With all of these when you tell the families worry, not just your war story, it must be hard to figure out what am i going to include, what am i not going to include and what makes sense and what doesnt make sense. They put all these pieces together. I actually sat down and started writing, it didnt take long. It took me about a year to even come to grips with always happening. When i first started out, it was a straight policy book because im a policy person. I was going to tell this very subject of hard facts, these are the things. The publisher saw one thing out why wrote a couple lines were thats more interesting and it will be easier because its your story. He was actually super hard and i cried literally every day writing the story. Sundays i couldnt write because the memory was so hard if that makes sense. To go back and reckoned with what i need to be true, what happens to me, what happens to my mother and just to share. She was a think the hardest person to write about. My mother was the hardest person to write about because we had a complicated relationship. Very quickly when i first started writing the book, i sent my editor the first chap your end it was really harsh on my mother. She sent it out and she said no, maam. You are not going to do this to her. I was like what, its a good chapter. It pulls people in. Its juicy. But she said no, you are not at her. Shes that you need to look for intelligent for his story. It prompted me to go back and think about my mother in her life in a different way so when you read the book you get to see my mother is a very complicated multidimensional person. So im assuming shes read the book. Your whole family has read the book. Well, let me just say, you know, i was intent on not letting them read it before it got to where there could be no changes. What should be included, that did not happen. I didnt want their voices in my head when i was writing. Finally i gave her to my mom to breathe. I was stunned. I was stunned that the first draft for after a few drafts. She started reading it and she said, you know, i laughed and i cried. She said but its ultimately your story to tell. I may not agree with your eyes and how you see things but its your story to tell. I call her back she had a few pages left in the book and i said to she finished the book . She said no. My mother is really fiery and feisty. I said well why . Because youre a liar. So a guy named to this tussle over the phone. But i could tell she is just like what she doesnt think sitting in the garage talking. So we got into this thing about my truth versus nurture it and shes like i i dont agree with this. So it was a really hard conversation. And so i think she took upnow, like it is not yours or its a towel. And so, weve still been in conversation about it and my brother has a copy and my father has read it and my grandmother. But i actually have to say that i have been relied to phone home because they have read that, you know. They are seeing themselves. So im sure they have a little beef. Youll just work through that